Invest KOREA

According to Pulse by Maeil Business News Korea,

South Korea will increase investment to nurture precision medicine that will enable different patients to receive different medical treatments specifically tailored to each patient. The government unveiled such a plan along with other long-term goals of growing artificial intelligence (AI) technology and virtual and augmented reality technology as the country’s core growth engines in 10 years as part of efforts to enhance the country’s competitiveness.

The announcement was made on Wednesday at a science and technology strategy session presided over by President Park Geun-hye at Cheong Wa Dae, the Ministry of Science, ICT and Future Planning said.

At the meeting, the government selected total nine strategic projects aimed at securing new growth engines among 166 candidate projects, which include unmanned vehicles, light materials, the smart city model, artificial intelligence (AI) and virtual reality (VR), as well as fine dust, carbon resources, precision medicine and new biologics aimed at improving the quality of life.

The government plans to inject a total of 2.21 trillion won ($2.01 billion) including 615.2 billion won from the private sector and 1.6 trillion won from the public sector into these projects. It will also do away with outdated regulations to ensure active investment in these areas.

To cultivate the prevision medicine industry, the government will first build a precision medicine cohort by gathering genetic, diagnosis and life data from 100,000 people and push to establish a special act on precision medicine.

“Each of these nine strategic projects is important for efforts to secure new growth engines (in the country) and the government should stop working in silos and co-design a connected approach to ensure the success of these projects,” said Park.

By Kim Ki-chul, Won Ho-sup

Copyrights Pulse by Maeil Business News Korea. All Rights Reserved.

Source: Pulse by Maeil Business News Korea (Aug. 11, 2016)